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smitty777 writes "Two new elements have been added to the periodic table of the elements. Elements 114 and 116 are the weightiest known, with atomic weights of 289 and 292 respectively. The discoverers are proposing flerovium and moscovium as names for these two new discoveries. There are also arguments being made to add in three more as well: 113, 115 and 118." We've noted element 114 in the past, but this is more official.

Meh. Most dictionaries are written by a useless class of people called descriptivists who slavishly record every (mis)use of a word. If you used Humperdink like this: "The morning was Humperdink", they'd create an entry for it, no matter how wrong or stupid it is. Going to a dictionary for proof of a word's meaning or validity is like citing Wikipedia as a source.

This is why the ignorant and lazy misuse words like decimate and literally. Stupid person uses it incorrectly... stupid listener repeats it... s

Shit! This conversation is damned compelling. I came in here expecting to be bored about properties of new elements, I was not - I repeat not - ready to witness this epic battle of which-unit-is-the-weightiest.

That would be the usual convention, yes. However the online UFOpaedia wiki site [ufopaedia.org] (and my vague recollections) suggest that it was also referred to as element 115 in the game. That being said, the wikipedia discussion on ununpentium [wikipedia.org] argues that Elerium-115 should be interpreted as the Elerium isotope of mass 115 rather than element 115, prompting this pop-culture reference's removal from the article.

Except that there was. The U-235 was a Type VIIC, commissioned 19 Dec 1942. She never saw combat service and was used as a training boat. Sunk by a US bombing raid on 14 May, 1943, she was successfully raised and put back into service. She was finally sunk for good when a German torpedo boat attacked her by mistake on 14 April, 1945. She went down with all 47 hands.

Only in that she was sunk by her own side. In the end, just about all the U-boats were sunk in action, and most went down with all hands. Over the entire course of the war, the U-boat service suffered a 75-80% casualty rate (and I can think of few nastier deaths than being trapped in a sinking submarine)--and yet, they were a all-volunteer outfit and never had a shortage of recruits.

I believe that naming system was used to fill in spots that either haven't been discovered/created, or that have been discovered but not verified/accepted. Once the corresponding element gets "voted onto the island", they give it an official name.

"A systematic element name is the temporary name and symbol assigned to newly synthesized and not yet synthesized chemical elements. In chemistry, a transuranic element receives a permanent name and symbol only after its synthesis has been confirmed."

The real issue isn't these elements which are unstable and not that interesting. The real question is whether the island of stability exists and how close we are to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability [wikipedia.org] If current theories are correct then there may be a section of elements with atomic numbers near 120 that are much more stable. They might even be stable enough to be used for practical purposes if we can synthesize them on a large scale. Depending on the exact model, they might have half-lives as short as a few seconds (which for elements in this range is comparatively large but not large enough to use for any practical purposes) or it might be as much as 100,000 years (there are more optimistic estimates but they seem extremely unlikely). For comparison, tritium has a half-life of about 12 years and is used in a lot of practical applications. So, if the island exists and we find good ways to synthesize these elements, then we might get some very interesting chemistry.

I'm still waiting on a high numbered inexpensively-manufactured element that has a short half life and quickly decays into non-radioactive gold and silver,
chemically, atomically indistinguishable from the stuff we mine:-)

Or find out the hard way why our neighboring stars aren't teeming with advanced civilizations."Congrats! We just created element 120 and it appears stable! Yay! What do you mean the sensors aren't working anymore? Ok who's messing with the clock and making the hands run backwards? How'd my underwear get on my head and why did Fred just turn into a polar bear?"

We're missing the island of stability and we don't know how to hit it yet. As the article you link states, "The manufacturing of nuclei in the island of stability proves to be very difficult, because the nuclei available as starting materials do not deliver the necessary sum of neutrons."

if the island exists and we find good ways to synthesize these elements, then we might get some very interesting chemistry.

I am not atom physicist, but if island of stability exists, then we should be able to find those elements without nuclear synthesis. Those elements would exist as they would be created the usual way by mother universe.

If you have unstable composite with over 250 parts, do you really expect that composite of 300-400 parts will be rock solid.

Larger elements almost certainly existed in the past, but there's nothing bigger than Bi that's stable on astronomical time scales (and even Bi has recently been discovered to be slightly radioactive, albeit with a very long half-life), so any heavy elements that were created in normal astronomical events have long-since decayed into lighter elements -- when you get to 200+ nucleons "stable" is a relative term.

Stability is relative. If we could create a very heavy element with a half-life of 10 years then that would be fascinating (and perhaps very useful)- but you won't find much of it floating around in space; all elements created "naturally" are created in the fusion reactions of stars, generally dispersed by supernova; anything created in most known supernovae would be gone long before it reaches us. And that's even assuming the fusion reactions in stars would be capable of producing such a very heavy element

I think youre the only other person on earth I have run into that knows about this game.

Really? My friends and I used to love it.

If you don't know about it, you might want to check out UFO:AI (ufoai.ninex.info, or find it on sourceforge). It's very playable but gets boring late in the game. That should improve as the game matures.

In the UK it was called UFO: Enemy Unknown, and I must have racked up 200 hours on that game. Also, I think you would be surprised about how popular the game is; certainly there are at least three full discussions on this Slashdot article discussing elerium-115 (including one started by yours truly), and as one of the other commenters have pointed out, there are several active open source projects aiming to recreate it's splendour (this article [wikipedia.org] has a list of the major projects).

That is one of the most hilarious Wikipedia pages I've ever seen. Another that comes to mind is the list of films considered the worst [wikipedia.org]. Lists seem to be a good holdout for ridiculous content.

I don't usually like to be the huge cynic, seeing conspiracy and evil everywhere, but my experience with editing wikipedia has been universally bad. All of my edits have been reverted, so in the end I just stopped trying. It wasn't even controversial topics - generally just spelling or grammar corrections and supplemental information on science and engineering topics (including cites).

Given that my spelling corrections were being quickly reverted when they were obvious to anyone who could read English, I ca

This moscovium made me think of other elements named for places. Europium [wikipedia.org] and Americium for continents. Lutetium [wikipedia.org] for Paris, Californium [wikipedia.org] for California. Dubnium [wikipedia.org] for Dubna, a city in Russia. Francium [wikipedia.org] and Gallium [wikipedia.org] for France, Germanium [wikipedia.org] for Germany, Polonium [wikipedia.org] for Poland), Hafnium [wikipedia.org] for Copenhagen, Holmium [wikipedia.org] for Stockholm (these last 2 from their Latin names). Then Hassium [wikipedia.org] for Hesse (Germany), Rhenium [wikipedia.org] for Eastern France (jk:D), Ruthenium [wikipedia.org] for the old region in Ukraine-Russia, Strontium [wikipedia.org] for a village in Scotland, Berkelium [wikipedia.org] for Berkeley, and Thulium [wikipedia.org] for a mythical island in the north Pole.

A special mention to the lucky sweddish village of Ytterby [wikipedia.org] that has four elements named in its honor: Yttrium [wikipedia.org], Ytterbium [wikipedia.org], Erbium [wikipedia.org], and Terbium [wikipedia.org].

It's really about time an element was named Daltonium. It was John Dalton who came up with the original ideas that led to correct theories about the structure of the atom and what an element was, yet his name is not honoured, and is passed over again and again for silly names. It's almost as if people have forgotten him....

It's really about time an element was named Daltonium. It was John Dalton who came up with the original ideas that led to correct theories about the structure of the atom and what an element was, yet his name is not honoured, and is passed over again and again for silly names. It's almost as if people have forgotten him....

Mostly, but more like Notobtaniumforverylongium. It had been predicted that Uuq (element 115) might be one "peak" on the islands of stability [wikipedia.org], but it seems that the actuality is a few elements lower. None of these talked about today should have much of a useful halflife.